Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize and categorize stubs and stub categories. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. Everyone is welcome to help; for more information please inquire on the talk page or see the "To do" list.

Stub articles are generally short, or below the high Wikipedia standard, or both. If they are not sorted, then it means they are less likely to be edited to higher quality as nobody necessarily knows the page is in need of attention. Even if a page is sorted into a category indicating it is in need of attention, such as the articles needing a cleanup, it is still not as good as putting it in a stub category. This is because stub categories attract experts in specific areas (chemists can see chemistry stubs for example), whereas generic cleanup and dead-end categories do not.

To put an article into a stub category, change the existing stub tag (if it exists) from {{stub}} to, for example, {{chem-stub}} if it is a chemistry stub. If it has no stub template but is clearly a stub, then add an appropriate stub template at the bottom of the article (below any categories).

No stub article should sit in only a stub category as this association is meant to be temporary. If no other category is listed, please add the standard article category that is the parent of the stub category.

If the article is no longer a stub, remove the stub template. Refer to Wikipedia:Stub for more information on this matter.

If it interests you, consider checking talk pages of stub articles to see whether they've been tagged by some appropriate WikiProject. Adding a suitable project banner to a stub's talk page can help bring it to the attention of the right editors more quickly.

A longer list of oversized stub categories to be split, in order of size, is here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/To do. This might also be used as a holding area for proposals not yet created, and for sub-categories in need of being sorted-down into.

User scripts: A user script is a bit of JavaScript that gets loaded each time you visit a Wikipedia article and that does things for you. Their use is quite varied: adding popups to links, making editing easier (for example, regex search and replace), changing article formatting, simplifying common tasks, etc. Usually the script is copied into a user's .js file.

Navigation popups: Installed in a user's .js file, this causes a small box to pop up when your mouse hovers over a wikilink. The box can show you the first paragraph of an article, whether it's tagged as a stub, how many categories it has, etc. Can be useful for finding stubs and for categorizing an article according to the text in the first paragraph.

PetScan (previously CatScan): Essentially a Boolean search tool. Enter a category or template and find items that use a different category or template, find all items under a certain size, find images, etc.

AutoWikiBrowser: A semi-automated Wikipedia editor for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP (or newer), designed to make tedious repetitive tasks quicker and easier. It is essentially a browser that automatically opens up a new page when the last is saved. When set to do so, it suggests some changes (typically formatting) that are generally meant to be incidental to the main change.

As of 2006[update], AutoWikiBrowser can create a list of articles from single or multiple categories, "what links here", the wiki links on an article, a text file, a Google search, a user's watchlist, or a user's contributions.

{{DEFAULTSORT:}}: You can use this code to force an article to sort correctly (for example, without "The" at the beginning of a title, by last name first), no matter what category it's in, even in stub categories. From the January 2007 Technology Report:

The default sort key of a page for categories can be changed using the new {{DEFAULTSORT}} magic word. For instance, on George Washington, {{DEFAULTSORT:Washington, George}} would cause a subsequent [[Category:United States presidents]] to be equivalent to [[Category:United States presidents|Washington, George]], not [[Category:United States presidents|George Washington]]. This is especially useful when the article belongs in many categories.

This category is for stub articles relating to foo. You can help by expanding them. This stub category is a parent-only category, that is, all stubs within it should be in one of its subcategories, or marked with a template that may eventually have a separate subcategory. To add an article to this category, please use the appropriate template for one of its subcategories.

It has been requested that this stub category be populated.Please add any stub articles that fall within this category to it.Please remove this tag once the category has been populated. This tool can help find stubs that belong in this category.

Template {{Upmerged stub category}} is used on category pages where there are upmerged templates feeding into that category. It appears like this:

This page is maintained by WikiProject Stub sorting, an attempt to bring some sort of order to Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to improve/expand the articles containing this stub notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Template {{WPSS-talk}} is used on the talk pages of some stub categories and templates. It appears like this: